The security of data is a very important consideration when operating data centers. Almost every user, from large corporate or governmental entities to an individual consumer, has an expectation that their data handled by a data center in a secure manner. To that end, numerous secure protocols have been created to ensure that data security is maintained. In situations where data is being transferred between data center computing systems, a data center may employ a secure protocol when transferring data, such as Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), to ensure data cannot be intercepted and read by a system other than the system for which the data is intended.
The above mentioned secure protocols may be used as a security measure in addition to one or more security measures already provided by a transport protocol, such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP). In physical computing environments, the processing resources consumed when securing data at multiple layers during transfer (e.g., using IPsec and TCP checksum) may be minimized by offloading at least the transport protocol's security measures to a network interface. However, in virtual computing environments, the network interface is typically virtualized and such offloading would still rely on the processing resources of the host computing system that provides the virtualized interface.